Features include seasonal changes, highlighted airport structures and mountains at night during winter (lighted buildings and simulating moonlight reflecting off snow) and a "reverse" ILS at Aspen-Pitkin for missed approaches, which is explained later in this document.

NOTE:

For lack of better way to explain it, this scenery is about Mountain Flying - the look, the feel, the considerations. When designing Aspen98, I spoke to a real-life pilot who described flying the Aspen area in winter. He said, "Man, you don't know the relief when you get that airport in sight and make that turn on final." He mentioned the feeling of "being up there all alone" and the special weirdness of flying just before daybreak with relatively low visibility or coming in for a landing as night is falling. We can't simulate all aspects of winter, snow or sleet, with Flight Simulator (yet), but this scenery is an attempt at capturing the experience. It is highly recommended that users fly with visibility at 10nm or less, and an add-on such as FS Clouds helps lend realism. Also, the airports are located about a half hour or so from each other, which especially works out for those among us who grab our FS time on the run and want to get the whole take-off, flight, approach and landing enchilada in and still not miss dinner.

One other thought. The scenery ain't perfect. There may be discrepancies in regard to the structures at airports (feel free to send any scanned photos to help in the next update), and there might be some criticism on the lack of detail at the towns and outlying areas. In truth, I feel it is difficult, if not impossible, to get towns looking right. I tried a lot of tricks, but nothing seemed to work. I have flown over cities during winter and, let's face it, there isn't too much to see. So (we are flying, not driving, right?), I opted to try to make the textures look as they would from the air. At over 1,000 feet above the deck I believe the textures with this scenery work pretty well. And, I tired to select colors and textures that would work with the FS ground textures. There are other city-type textures available for download and feel free to use any other textures you prefer. Just be sure to name them Aspen_?. r8 and put them in the proper location. Please note that artistic license was exercised in designing the scenery and compromises were definitely made.

Last, but not least. Speaking of updates, there should be an update to this in a few months with meshed ground. Not doubt that FS2000 is going to open some doors, so, we'll see what happens, but there may be another around (gulp) the first if the year, 2000.

Oh. And thanks for downloading this. At the end of this, I say, " Please send any comments or suggestions." I really do appreciate feedback and, if you are enjoying the scenery I would love to get some e-mail. If you have some constructive comments, this is welcome too. If you plain hate the scenery, well, as our Moms taught us, "If you can't say anything nice…"

Copy the Aspen scenery, exclude and COW-MTS BGLS to ASPEN\SCENERY and copy *.R8 files to ASPEN\TEXTURE. If necessary, unzip Default Airports.zip into ASPEN\SCENERY.

If replacement winter textures are to be used, again, make back-ups of the default files in \Flight Simulator\Texture and unzip the new PRARIEW.R8 and PRAIRW_M.R8 files into that directory.

Set up as LOCAL scenery in Scenery Manager above the FS CD-ROM US files. Check for other Colorado scenery that might be active.